Director Tim Supple has perhaps felt the
twin impulses to make this production much the same as his wondrous
multi-culti
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
of 2006-7, and to make it very different. Where it follows the earlier
production is in using a cast of intercontinental origins, although in
this case, lines are delivered in English only. Where the
Dream showed us the universality of
love, magic and things fantastical, this
As You Like It seeks to make a
similar point about nationality to Richard Bean’s
England People Very Nice, namely
that the English are a richly hybrid people, and so Shakespeare’s
essence-of-England Arden can sustain (for instance) a finale that
features several diverse marriage rites.
Unfortunately, this is a point I gleaned from reading around the
production (programme notes, pre-publicity) rather than from
impressions gained in performance. For the most significant difference
from the
Dream is that this
show is almost entirely devoid of fun. One cannot blame Supple for
cutting too-revered set-piece routines such as Rosalind’s “I’ll tell
you who time ambles withal” and Touchstone’s “degrees of the lie” (I
suspect he might even have axed the Seven Ages of Man speech if he’d
thought he could get away with it), but plenty of gag opportunities
that remain are simply not taken, perhaps even deliberately suppressed.
I am fond of Kevork Malikyan as an actor, but his jester Touchstone
orates rather than bantering. There
are
laughs, but they are pitifully thin on the ground. Playing Jaques as
genuinely, and increasingly, melancholy can work as a contrast to the
merriment elsewhere in the forest; here, Justin Avoth feels as if on
his final exit he might hang himself from a tree before he gets to his
hermit’s cave.
Neither the design nor the venue itself help matters. Anna Fleischle’s
set converts from floorboards into a wood-cum-wasteland which leave us
in no doubt that this is not an Arden where folk “fleet the time
carelessly”. And Leicester’s major new theatre (to which I was
belatedly paying my first visit) is, in view of its design brief, a
surprisingly unresponsive space. Above all, though, in hoping to
Trojan-horse meditations on nationality and exile inside this comedy,
Supple seems to have neglected to build the comedic horse itself. I
hate to say it, but this production is dreary; more disturbingly, it
may well be dreary by design.
Written for the Financial
Times.